L.W.ROTH, ARTIST: Graphics Storage

"I swear it. I noticed it last Sunday and pointed it out to my kids. They thought I was daft. They thought mom's really losing it, but they haven't stood watch over that spot where the wild daffodils grow anxious for a glimpse of green. They didn't know what to look for.
These are definitely reference photographs. I can't seem to shake my fascination with lines intercepting one another, cordoning off spaces of various sizes which all go together to form a complex composition. Painting macro landscapes, the woods, would be so much easier if I could. Maggie's cat out for a hunt was just a fun shot, another sign of Spring, that will serve me well in a painting I did five or six years ago. She looks thin right now, but by the end of summer, that feline will need a spa reservation."

AND THAT'S "A GLIMPSE OF SPRING," A POST I WROTE A WEEK AGO.
The photographs for that post are at the bottom of this post. They no longer exist.

Cancun 2012 - Beachwalk, watercolor
Retrieved from my blog

EASTER SUNDAY, THESE PHOTOGRAPHS AND ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHS I've taken since I went into digital photography are gone--wiped out by one Western Digital, 3TB External Drive, My Book Essential, just three months old, that over heated due to use 24/7. My family files are gone. My photography files are gone. My video files are gone. My art files are gone. All I have left are the ones I happened to take with the iPad, the Blackberry and photos I can download off this blog. I tear up thinking about it. I want our family's bus trip to Niagara Falls for Ellis's seventieth back! I want the silly video I took off the balcony of our room at the Ritz while Ellis was bothering me to go to lunch. I want...my family and vacation history back most of all.

Mr. Fuzzy Pants, work in progress detail, oil, retrieved from my Blackberry

I kept saying when I got the external drive and the kids set it up for me 'keep the box, I want the manual.' They kept saying there isn't one. I didn't believe them. All devices and appliances come with how to use information. The vanity in my powder room is stacked with owner manuals for all the appliances and devices in this house including the electric garage door opener and my hot water vaporizer. All came with an operating manual--some with a hard disk. And they all have instruction tips and warnings--like don't use this device 24/7. It might burn out. They all have troubleshooting in them and contact information. Not this one. Though I'm computer short to young folks, I am a computer guru in my own age bracket. And this old guru spent Easter online looking for WD's manual for My Book Essential. What I found instead was a bunch of other folks, young and old, crying they couldn't access their WD drive and the precious contents. It didn't make me any happier to know I wasn't alone in my despair. Their data woes and mine made me angrier at Western Digital.

Steve and Family, photograph. Retrieved from my iPad. It's these photos I weep for.

Beyond sad and defeated, I Binged 'data recovery in Michigan' and came up with a highly recommended company (Better Business Bureau) called Digital Recovery Group Forensics, (DRG). And that's where my WD external hard drive is now. Ron will call me today with the prognosis. If there's data that can be retrieved I have to bring in another external drive to transfer it to. Makes sense. --BUT when Ron said that these devices only have an 18 month lifespan before they burn out, I'm thinking why would I store my data in one of these things again if there's a chance it's going to fail a year and a half from now and I go through the same agony? A dilemma. A reason to buy some costly computer with 3TB of memory OR sizable space in The Cloud. I think I'm going for the Cloud.

Fifty bucks a year, I get 100 GB of storage. You can buy less for less. You can use the i Cloud if you're an Apple person for free--the way I understood an article on the cloud in Wikiview. In the neighborhood of seven hundred dollars or more, plus the cost of another external hard drive, buys me any data that can be retrieved by my expert.

Waiting for DRG's call, I have crossed my fingers and sent prayers to Saint Anthony. An Artist's life is in photographs. Graphics take a lot of memory. Three terabytes (TB) should have lasted my lifetime, but the electronics couldn't support the capacity or frequent usage. That's what we call a shanda in Yiddish, a screwing, a shagging in English.

A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. Photographs that were stored in WD's My Book Essential until it overheated.